Tuesday, 20 April 2010

In 1992, Ken Buckley described the federal council of staff associations during the Cold War:

The Federal Council became very heavily involved [in] matters of political discrimination in appointments in universities; there was the Russell Ward case, and there were a number of others. There was even one academic, not known to me beforehand, who deposited with me a bulky envelope, with instructions to leave it sealed until a situation arose in which he would have action taken against him within his university on political grounds; at such time the envelope was to be opened and Federal Council informed. I destroyed that envelope, I am glad to say, unopened, years later, because no such action was taken; but it is an indication of the uneasiness of the period.[1]

Despite what Buckley said, in Australia there are not many high profile cases of political discrimination within the universities during the Cold War. The Ward case that he mentioned at the University of NSW and the Knopfelmacher case at Sydney are isolated – but significant – incidents. Buckley didn’t mention Knopfelmacher as, far from protecting him from political discrimination, Buckley’s FAUSA colleague Ted Wheelwright had been instrumental in ensuring, on political grounds, he was not appointed to Sydney University.

The Ward case started in 1956 when the University of NSW failed to appoint historian Russell Ward, who had formerly been a member of the Australian Communist Party – though at that point the identity of the rejected applicant was not yet public knowledge. As a result of the rejection, economist RM Hartwell resigned and, at a meeting of Council insisted that his reasons for his resignation were recorded: that he believed the university’s failure to appoint Ward was a result of a “political test”, on which issue he said he had “followed up extensively”.[2] Baxter and the Chancellor would not allow Hartwell to speak, saying that proceedings of appointments committees were confidential and exposing its details would “make employment in this university impossible”.[3] Four years later, when employed at Oxford, Hartwell made reference to the reasons for his resignation, creating two things: an angry and defensive Philip Baxter and new enemy for the university staff association. The staff association had written to all the universities a couple of years about political freedom and Baxter, true to his rather autocratic style, had “in effect told FAUSA it was impertinent to enquire”.[4] So when the reasons for Hartwell’s resignation emerged and Baxter rapidly, but unsatisfactorily, responded, the staff association had a reason to attack a man whose politics FAUSA leaders undoubtedly already decried. Russell Ward confessed that he was the unappointed ex-communist of the case and a media fracas resulted. Baxter, even up until the 1980s, gave multiple and conflicting versions of the events.[5] The case damaged his reputation and the university’s and he sustained a longstanding mistrust of Hartwell, keeping a personal file on him and his activities. An anonymous and undated handwritten note in Baxter’s papers gave him advice on how to deal with “attacks upon the university” in light of an impending visit by Hartwell in 1963. This advice concluded that a Royal Commission “with carefully predetermined Terms of Reference” would be best:

It would seem desirable to list allegations made recently and particularly those made in the future so that Terms of Reference advantageous to the university could be drawn up at short notice.[6]

Universities were increasingly politicised spaces and their management, it seems, was requiring new and sometimes devious political tools.

Politics plagued David Malet Armstrong, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1964 until the 1990s (and continued as Emeritus to the present). In a 1986 oral history interview, Armstrong said he’d heard Frank Knopfelmacher speak before he’d taken John Anderson’s old Chair. He thought, as a political philosopher, Knopfelmacher would complement Armstrong’s own skills, so he sought to have him appointed to a vacancy as senior lecturer in the department:

I was a pretty innocent young professor. I didn’t understand much about university politics anyway. I certainly didn’t foresee the row.[7]

If that was true, he was strangely well prepared for one. The three folders of material attached to the Knopfelmacher dispute are testament not only to Armstrong’s obsessive filing habits, but also to the amount of political preparation Armstrong did to give Knopfelmacher the greatest chance of being appointed to the position. His letter shows that he colluded with colleagues to ensure Sydney University currently had no competent logicians, for instance, so that Knopfelmacher would have no competition.[8] Unsigned letters from colleagues attest to the presence of known enemies in the process:

Dick either has written or will do so very soon re. S’s latest ploy (very transparent) re. trying to make sure, without appearing to do so, That K has no chance.[9]

‘S’ refers to Wal Suchting, a junior member of staff in the department who we will see in the next chapter. However, it is enough to show that Armstrong did foresee a row and everyone around him was prepared for one. He may have felt the need to be prepared partly because Knopfelmacher was not really a philosopher. At that time he was residing in the psychology department at Melbourne University and his academic work had largely been in that field. His political publications were considered, by Sydney’s Professorial Board, to be rather fanatical anti-communist articles in semi-popular publications. The official University of Sydney history suggests that there was nothing untoward, then, that the Professorial Board rejected the recommendation of the appointments committee that he be granted the position.[10] The only real problem, according to that account, was that confidential details of the appointments committee were leaked to the press[11], leading to such media attention that the case was pointed to in NSW parliament as evidence of a Communist conspiracy.[12]

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was following the case closely too. A second appointments committee was created to consider applicants to the position and Ted Wheelwright’s ASIO file shows that the Director-General of Security reported every few days to the Attorney-General and Prime Minister Menzies on progress towards having Kopfelmacher appointed.[13] They reported on the number of eligible voters on the Professorial Board, suggesting that if a greater number attend than in the first consideration of his application, it could “reverse the Board’s previous decision and appoint Dr Knopfelmacher to the position”. Copies of these letters were included in Wheelwright’s file, as he had lobbied members of the first appointments committee to vote against the appointment. However, when Armstrong had returned from overseas the wavering committee had voted in Knopfelmacher’s favour.[14] Wheelwright lobbied members of this second committee too, which rejected Knopfelmacher’s application.[15] Harry Eddy wrote to the staff association, suggesting that rejection of Knopfelmacher’s application showed a similar violation of academic freedom as the Orr case which, as we have seen, was his personal interest. The staff association – led at that point by Ted Wheelwright – replied that they were convinced that all was right in this instance. Copies of both letters are in Armstrong’s file.[16]

Although the Cold War did not result in widespread difficulties with appointing academics of left or right persuasions, the Knopfelmacher and Ward cases suggest two new attributes of university knowledge in the period. Firstly, that the connection of knowledge to government had grown so that the Prime Minister and Attorney General might have an intimate interest in which philosopher was being appointed to senior lecturer at one of the universities. Knowledge for the nation, once fears of communism (or political repression) took hold, presented a possible security risk to ASIO. To some academics it implied that knowledge should be ‘owned’: controlled by those with political persuasions they could agree with. Secondly, a unified sense of knowledge as truth, protected by academic experts, has nearly disappeared. These cases suggest that knowledge was perceived as individualised, contingent on political and ideological beliefs.

[2] University of NSW, "Transcript of Part of the Proceedings at the Meeting of Council of the University of NSW Held on 9 July 1956.," in Baxter Papers UNSW/CN1053/Box50 Loose document (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1956).

[3] NSW, "Transcript of Part of the Proceedings at the Meeting of Council of the University of NSW Held on 9 July 1956.."

[4] O'Farrell, UNSW: A Portrait. The University of New South Wales 1949-1999, 98.

[5] O'Farrell, UNSW: A Portrait. The University of New South Wales 1949-1999, 97-100.

Monday, 19 April 2010

The Orr case, even more than discussions about ‘service station’ and ‘ivory tower’ universities, was a prominent topic in university corridors, at intellectuals’ dinner parties and libertarian push pubs from its start in 1955 through to the mid-1960s.[1] It had all the elements of a delicious scandal: an already controversial professor, Sydney Sparkes Orr had been dismissed from the University of Tasmania for misconduct, having seduced one of his students. Unsuccessfully appealing against this finding in court, Orr persuaded some of his colleagues that he had been set up, that in fact his dismissal was an attempt to get rid of him for political reasons. The Cold War added an air of secrecy to the case and the idea that academic staff were being dismissed for holding unpopular opinions on campus reeked of political repression. Orr’s ardent supporters, RD (Panzee) Wright and Harry Eddy, promoted his cause and Eddy published (with, according to Cassandra Pybus, substantial contributions from Orr himself) a lengthy and inscrutable book, simply entitled Orr.[2] Many Academics across Australia – especially the Sydney libertarians – were convinced that seducing a young woman was unlikely to be the real reason for dismissing a philosopher and it was widely believed that the dismissal of Orr was a violation of academic freedom.[3] A large number also thought he was guilty – in trying, like all other Vice-Chancellors, to find a place for Orr (preferably elsewhere), Baxter, for example, said: “few of us would care to contemplate his being put in charge of students”.[4] Letters to Baxter from colleagues stated frankly that their authors considered Orr to be guilty of the misconduct leading to his dismissal. But the authors of all these letters, held now in Baxter’s archived papers, were universally keen to see the Orr case resolved by his employment somewhere.[5] This was because the staff association’s involvement in the case was then disrupting the entire Australian university system.

In 1962 the Vice Chancellor of the University of Tasmania, Keith Isles, wrote to Philip Baxter and Louis Matheson (Vice-Chancellor at the brand new Monash University in Melbourne) begging for help on the Orr case. Isles thought that if one of the universities could give Orr a job, that everyone “including FCUSAA” could get out of the mess the case had created without losing face. As for him, he was keen to be able to get philosophers to Tasmania again, for the staff association, under pressure from Orr’s supporters, had put a black ban on his university.[6] An initiative of John Anderson at Sydney, members of the staff association agreed that no philosopher would take a position at Tasmania and that no university would later employ a philosopher who did.[7] The ban was not implemented for a few years after the dismissal, however, a fact that Pybus, in her reconsideration of the Orr case, found suspicious.[8] The staff association, she claimed, used the high profile of the Orr case and the suspicions that Orr promoted to raise issues of tenure, academic freedom and the conditions under which universities may dismiss professorial staff. These were all important issues, Pybus maintained, but the injustices to both the University of Tasmania and the young woman who complained about Orr were heavy costs.[9]

After visiting the University of Tasmania in 1958, Ken Buckley and Roland Thorp of the federal staff association, wrote:

Just as disturbing as the actual Court ruling (that the relationship of the University to a professor is that of master to servant) is the fact that the University itself, through the lawyers it briefed, propounded this false concept long before the Court so ruled – and the University has not since disavowed it.[10]

Pybus, like Orr’s lawyers when presented with this argument, was not impressed. “No matter how some people attempted to dress it up”, she said, “the concern with the master-servant relationship was a trade-union issue, to do with the protection of academic tenure and the terms and conditions of academic appointments”.[11] Worse, she claimed, it was elitist – the general community understandably “did not care for the suggestion that academics were superior to the legal obligations which govern contracts of employment”.[12] But to describe it as arrogance is to misunderstand the point. The staff association’s concerns about the master-servant relationship and tenure were not about preservation of privilege, but rather protection of the conditions that enabled academic freedom.

In the recent case UWA v Gray, the Federal Court pointed out that most universities in Australia are structured as membership-based organizations. That is, the Acts enabling the public universities each describe the university as consisting of, among other members, its academic staff. For the Federal Court in 2008, this meant that academics do not have fiduciary obligations to the institution so much as they are the institution. This structure, the Court recognised, was designed to protect academic freedom. The reasoning is that the authority universities possess is based on the fact that inquiry conducted within them is untainted by motives of profit or politics.[13] Inquiry, under this structure, is conducted freely by experts who have not been compelled by external forces to come to predetermined conclusions.[14] Through this freedom, university-based knowledge is deemed trustworthy and has traditionally been granted higher esteem than other types of knowledge.[15] If the academics of which the university consists are instead positioned in a servant relationship to the institution as master, this system is put at risk. Obviously, the highest risk attached to the master-servant relationship is that if an academic comes to a conclusion their employer does not approve of, they may lose their job. This is why tenure, ensuring sufficient security in academic employment to enable academics to hold even unpopular opinions, has been considered central to academic freedom and the consequent authority of the university over knowledge. In UWA v Gray, the tone of Justice French’s Federal Court judgement seems to express surprise that any university would prefer to position academics as employees and undermine the basis of their own authority.[16] It is this same reasoning that so disturbed Thorp and Buckley – when the University of Tasmania made the case that their dismissal of Orr was acceptable since the relationship was a master-servant one it betrayed the principles on which it could claim its status as a university. Of course, as the staff association became increasingly unionised, as we will see in a later chapter, the association gained advantages from positioning staff in opposition to the institutions as ‘management’ and strengthened this objectionable structure themselves.

Baxter embraced the reconstruction of the university as a public utility, but everyone in the university felt it, many with some regret. The ‘service station’ versus ‘ivory tower’ debate that we saw in chapter one had raged through the universities in the 1950s coalesced, by the mid-1960s, to a certainty. As political philosopher PH (Perce) Partridge put it:

It is no longer a wry jest: universities are now, in considerable part, public utilities or instrumentalities. They are being increasingly supported by governments from public funds because they carry out public functions, as hospitals and public transport systems do.[1]

Compare, for example, two cross-disciplinary discussions about Australian universities held at the University of Sydney – one in 1954, the other 1965. In 1954, the debate had life. Sydney philosopher John Anderson argued vehemently that the university was there for no purpose other than the furtherance of knowledge itself: whether Australia had sufficient medical doctors was not the concern of academics, for the university was not a graduate-factory where “university teaching is an industry that has a certain product”.[2] Unlike Anderson, many academic staff in attendance – which included the Dean of Arts, RB Farrell, RM Hartwell from economics at the NSW University of Technology, WHC (Harry) Eddy from Adult Education at Sydney, JJ Auchmuty from Newcastle, Marcus Oliphant from the Australian National University and of course, Philip Baxter – were interested in government policy around higher education and felt that academic staff should have a say in it. If universities were considered to be public instrumentalities, this say, many felt, might have more weight.[3] The moral philosophers, PH Partridge and AK Stout felt that it was part of a larger question about the social functions of the university, which went beyond providing sufficient graduates, as they had during the war, to a philosophical question about the relationship of university knowledge and education to society.[4] The overall tone of the discussion was one of possibility: the university sector could at that point go either way, towards public utility or to cloistered knowledge with various nuances applied, by their advocates, to both.

Such possibility had disappeared by a similar (though not so high profile) seminar in 1965. This seminar included discussion of the “social role of higher education in Australia” by sociologist Sol Encel and Perce Partridge who by then was a political philosopher at the Australian National University. There was no longer any question of whether universities had a social role, rather what exactly that role was.[5]Many felt that, as government interference increased there may not be any choice. This seminar had been organised by EL (Ted) Wheelwright and Ken Buckley at Sydney university to attempt to establish dialogue between the new post-Murray Australian Universities Commission, the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee and (their own interest) the emerging academic staff union who sponsored the event, the Federation of Australian University Staff Associations, known for around 25 years as FAUSA.[6] With the power now attached to the Commonwealth as a result of its increased funding, academics felt they needed this unified organisation to have a voice at all in higher education issues – whereas in 1954 they could still consider whether they allowed a voice to others. Earlier known as the Federal Council of University Staff Associations or FCUSA, the association had recently gained a great deal of its strength and credibility as a result of the Orr case at the University of Tasmania.

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

This book touches on both things I'm interested in for my thesis and things I did in the long distant past before it .[Before I decided to do my thesis in educational history I was keen on urban history and particularly Sydney - and wrote work on Sydney's AWA tower, on Norman Lindsay's women (bohemian Sydney) and a history of New Year's Eve in Sydney see http://usyd.academia.edu/HannahForsyth/Papers]

Also, the authors Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill both have cameo roles in my thesis due to their involvement in the period of student radicalism (and its impact on university knowledge) which is the subject of a chapter in the middle of it all. For their sake I hope everyone buys a copy!

Tuesday, 13 April 2010

The sense that Baxter held that problems of nation, industry and university were a united whole was a part of his allegiance to democracy:

The immense technological progress of the Soviet Union during the last thirty years focuses attention in the United States and Great Britain on the fact that their industrial progress is being limited by the shortage of engineers and technologists.[1]

This was a “rude awakening” he said, from the “comforting belief” that democracy produced better science, or that the west “had a kind of natural aptitude for this sort of work”. Due to a low population and a large landmass, Australia was especially vulnerable, he said, making mechanisation even more important as a way to reduce labour requirements. More, exploitation of nature was needed as a defensive act:

The full development of Australia’s natural resources is essential if we are not to present to other and more powerful nations the tempting sight of rich uncultivated lands and mineral wealth lying idle.[2]

During the Cold War, for those who feared communism, knowledge was as much a race as it had been during the Second World War – the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the ‘space race’ it provoked was a dramatic example. In promoting the need to increase technological graduates and industry-based research in the universities, he drew on fears of invasion. Democratic civilisation depended thus on technological progress. The consequent economic development would not only continue to increase Australian standard of living, but also protect both Australia and democracy from communism.[3]

Ian Clunies Ross, in the 1940s, had joined other Australian and British intellectuals in expressing support for Soviet educational and cultural development in opposition to fascism.[4] At a series of addresses by leading intellectuals (including Miles Franlin and Katherine Susannah Prichard) held in Sydney in 1941, Ian Clunies Ross said:

The cardinal feature of scientific development in the Soviet Union is the recognition of science not as something detached and unco-ordinated, but as an integral part of a planned and ordered society.[5]

This is largely, of course, a difference in speaking from anti-fascism in the early 1940s as Clunies Ross did to anti-communism in the 1950s and 1960s like Baxter. But it also reflects a distinction between the ways they each saw knowledge. Clunies Ross considered knowledge, as shown in the last chapter, to be a unified truth, which supported a civil and humane society. The extension of this civility to Soviet science was, for him, a part of the generosity of the culture that could result from the unifying characteristic of shared knowledge:

It would be appropriate for Australian scientific institutions to issue an invitation to certain outstanding Russian workers to continue their investigations in Australia.

The contrast to Baxter is stark. Baxter did not consider university knowledge to be truth in any universal sense and instead sought to unify industrial practice, government policy and university knowledge for the purposes of economic efficiency. A similar structure – knowledge supports civilisation – is skewed a different way. Knowledge supports technological and thus economic development. This link between knowledge and the economy that was so explicit with the emergence of technological universities is central to changes in widespread perspectives on university knowledge thereafter.

For Baxter, the distinction between Soviet and democratic knowledge was, firstly, that coordination in a totalitarian state did provide greater efficiencies, making it difficult for democratic nations to compete.[6] Democratic nations must compete, however, for in Baxter’s view they did not currently have sufficient scientists to be able to govern themselves properly.[7] The second distinction Baxter identified from the Soviet system did not produce efficiencies but made an important qualitative difference to university knowledge in democracies - academic freedom:

In the context of academic freedom the important responsibility of the university is to be a place where all matters and questions can be examined, where research may follow any line of inquiry, where the non-conformist and the heretic may hold and express unorthodox and unpopular views, and be met with argument not suppression. This does not mean that the university normally seethes with heresy and rebellion: on the contrary, but should there be a time when our free society is in danger, if governments of the right or left seek to diminish our liberties, it should be in the universities that voices could and would be loudly raised in protest.[8]

As Vice-Chancellor, he said, he was the university’s spokesman, but he felt he should always try to make clear that this does not make it likely that his views represented those of all of his staff – nor would such unity be desirable. The free speech encouraged within universities as places where thinking must be free would sometimes lead “some sections of the public” to demand action against some individuals. “This the vice-chancellor must firmly resist”:

The vice-chancellor can do much to get the community to realise that universities are places where heresies are tolerated and that it is for the good of the community that this should be so.[9]

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About Me

I have kept this blog since 2008. In that time I completed a PhD in the history department at the University of Sydney called “The Ownership of Knowledge in Higher Education in Australia, 1939-1996” and have begun new work. This blog recounts my pathway through my research and thinking to include work on social inclusion, historiography, labour history and the history of knowledge. Hopefully it goes without saying that anything here is a draft. It is a blog, not a book. Lots of times I could be wrong - if I am, please tell me.